By Don Nelson The daily Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) reports from the crews clearing the snow off the North Cascades Highway are like nothing we’ve read in years. The snowpack levels are low, the avalanche chutes are relatively benign, the daily temperatures are moderate and the big machines are clearing pavement at a...

By Don Nelson It’s Sunshine Week again, and I’m not talking about our spring-like weather. To explain Sunshine Week, an annual nationwide event that started more than a dozen years ago, it’s perhaps more efficient to offer this description from the organization’s website (http://sunshineweek.org): “Sunshine Week is about the public’s right to know what its...

By Don Nelson Does Winthrop have the will to remain Western? The question came up again — as it has several times since I arrived here nearly four years ago — at last week’s Town Council meeting. Craig Lints, former owner of the River Run Inn, told the council he has seen a steady deterioration in enforcement or even...

By Don Nelson For a small town with only about 400 residents and covering a little more than 500 acres, Winthrop is a complicated place. There’s the downtown commercial core, where the heart of Winthrop’s Westernization theme beats. There are other commercial areas along Highway 20 and adjacent to downtown. There is an industrial zone....

Are we are at “acceptance” yet? In the long legal and philosophical battle over the Okanogan County Public Utility District’s proposed new powerline from Pateros to Twisp, the remaining option seems to be “get used to it.” The Washington Supreme Court’s recent decision that the utility has the authority to condemn state land to build...

By Don Nelson When I got up Sunday morning to find a few inches of fresh snow that touched up the existing base and reclaimed the bare spots, I recalled that it was just about a year ago that the snow finally started falling for the season. During the trying winter of 2013-14, it hardly...

By Don Nelson I swear, I had nothing to do with it. But once Lauralee Northcott, the irrepressible, multi-talented Horse Crazy cowgirl started putting together the little shindig that will take over the Methow Valley Community Center on Saturday (Jan. 31), I had no choice but to become happily involved. Lauralee has poured a lot...

By Don Nelson We are now less than six months away from what you might call the one-year anniversary of the Carlton Complex Fire, which started its rampage on or about July 14, 2014. So it’s a little unnerving to learn, as we did from reporter Ann McCreary’s story in last week’s issue, that the...

By Don Nelson Maybe it’s a frustrating, momentary lapse of recall that you shrug off as a “senior moment.” It could be a prolonged inability to recall something that you have always been able to instantly access, like a name or date. It could be something as simple as staring at a word you have...

By Don Nelson There’s hardly anything left to say about 2014, which will be remembered as the year of what happened, while 2015 will be remembered as the year of what came next. We will all be looking at a different Methow Valley landscape — literally and figuratively — come next December. I’m not big on making or suggesting...